When Gotham FC won the 2023 NWSL Championship, the New York Post ran a story about Megan Rapinoe tearing her ACL. The home team’s victory got zero coverage. Emily Tisch Sussman saw that, made note of it, and got to work.

In this episode of FOMO Sapiens, Patrick McGinnis welcomes Emily Tisch Sussman, co-owner of the two-time NWSL champion New York/New Jersey Gotham FC, creator and host of the award-winning iHeart podcast She Pivots, Tony-nominated Broadway producer, and Democratic political strategist who spent 20 years working on federal policy and campaigns before pivoting into one of the most exciting spaces in sports and media today.

The conversation covers:

• Why campaign workers — not policy wonks — are the most entrepreneurial people in politics, and what scrappy, reactive, resource-constrained campaign culture has in common with building a startup
  
• How Emily Tisch Sussman and her sister Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, former Head of Global Marketing at Peloton and now NWSL Chair, became the controlling owners of Gotham FC and what they found when they got there
  
• The systemic challenges of owning a women’s sports team — from sharing stadiums built for men’s teams, to fighting for parade permits, to making the case for a White House visit that had never happened for women’s soccer before
  
• Why the fan conversion model in women’s sports is not what most people expect: fans of other women’s sports convert far more readily than fans of men’s soccer, and what that tells you about what actually drives the growth
  
• What brands get wrong when they try to enter women’s sports, why tokenistic investments waste everyone’s time, and what authentic sponsorship actually looks like
  
• Five years of hosting She Pivots and what 155 conversations with women who’ve gone through major life transitions taught Emily about what it means to build something real out of disruption
  
• Why the language we use — saying “soccer” versus “women’s soccer” — has measurable consequences for algorithms and media coverage, and what everyone can do right now to move the needle

Patrick and Emily Tisch Sussman also get into the algorithm bias problem in sports search results, the cultural playbook Emily runs at the intersection of Gotham and New York City — from Spike Lee opening home games to front rows at Fashion Week — and why Sue Bird’s quote about dynasties is the only one that matters.